The Bravest Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		0.5
Audio		2.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

The Bravest Blu-ray Movie Review

The Guys Who Run INTO Burning Buildings

Reviewed by Michael Reuben April 22, 2012

The Bravest had eerily perfect timing. A creation of producer Russell Best's National Video Center, the show's creative team set out to apply the format of Fox TV's successful (and still running) reality show, COPS, to the world of firefighting. With technical advice from Lt. Peter Sapienza of the New York Fire Department, The Bravest was greenlit by the Hearst Organization in 2000. Film crews accompanied firemen for seven months on calls in various cities, including New York, Miami, San Francisco, Dallas, Los Angeles and Washington, interviewing individuals about their jobs both on the scene and back at the station. Editors and a post-production team assembled the footage, closely following the COPS template, down to the introductory disclaimer that persons are innocent until proven guilty (which is not as odd as it first might seem, given the variety of situations to which firefighters are summoned). The Hearst Corporation lined up stations across the country for syndication; the CBS affiliate took the show in New York, the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles, local stations in Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta and Houston.

Then 9/11 happened. Many of the New York firefighters who appear in The Bravest died in the collapse of the Twin Towers. And suddenly everyone was interested in firefighters. The Bravest began airing on September 24, 2001, enjoyed a response far beyond anything its creators anticipated, and continued for a year. Forty-four half-hour episodes were filmed and aired either individually or in hour-long blocks of two. This Blu-ray release contains the first twenty-two episodes, all of which are dedicated to the firefighter victims of 9/11 and end with information about donations to the fund for the benefit of their survivors.

Why didn't the show continue longer? It's not that people "forgot" about firefighters, as Denis Leary's character, Tommy Gavin, often complained in Rescue Me. Indeed, the longevity of Rescue Me, which ran from 2004 through 2011, demonstrated the interest that firefighters' activities continued to hold for an audience, when those activities were dramatized as an integral element of complex, fully rounded lives. But after watching only half of the episodes of The Bravest, which contains genuinely educational and sometimes gripping footage, it becomes clear that there are limits to the entertainment value to be extracted from men in protective gear breaking in doors and windows, ventilating a rooftop, rendering emergency aid or talking about their love for the job. COPS endures not because of the cops themselves, but because of the endlessly colorful parade of scoundrels, crazies and lowlifes they encounter on their nightly rounds. A fireman's work doesn't pack the same TV-friendly variety—a point that hits home by about the third time the show's narrator, Greg Stebner, solemnly invokes the nickname "Red Devil" for the firefighter's chief adversary.

There's a sequence in episode 8 that neatly illustrates the point. A D.C. fire company receives a report that a woman has been injured in an assault. The company arrives on scene where the police have separated a couple that fought while driving in a car. The woman is crying, and the man is protesting at length while being handcuffed and placed in a squad car. As the boyfriend rails at the unfairness of it all (with multiple words bleeped out), both the camera and the editor keep coming back to him, even though the firefighters are huddled around the woman, who is being checked for injury. She's distraught, but the boyfriend keeps playing to the camera, and the female cop taking him to jail knows it all too well (she turns discreetly away). At that point, it becomes patently obvious—though not especially admirable—why police work makes for more entertaining TV. Fire may be frightening, but it doesn't know how to make a spectacle of itself.

Each half-hour segment of The Bravest (roughly twenty minutes without commercials) is set in one city and, in most cases, follows a single company on a series of calls. Occasionally, one call will dominate the half hour. A conflagration in an abandoned prison in Newark, N.J., involving multiple fire companies and a partial building collapse, became such a huge operation that it had to be spread over two half hours (episodes 17 and 18).

Many calls turn out to be nothing serious, but they're all handled with the same sense of urgency, because the responders never know what they'll find until they arrive on the scene. In Boston, they respond to a report of a person trapped in an elevator (episode 22). By the time they arrive, the elevator has resumed operation, but a mother with a small child is paralyzed with fear from the anxiety of the experience. In the same city, firemen receive a report of smoke in a high-rise apartment building (episode 20). After breaking into the apartment that is the source, they find no one currently home, no fire and the remains of burned food. In San Francisco, the department is called when workers at a fast food restaurant find an unlabeled barrel filled with a mysterious liquid behind the facility (episode 2). Firemen cordon off the area, don hazmat gear and take samples for testing, but the substance is deemed harmless, and the barrel is safely removed.

Other calls are more serious. In Miami, firemen are the first on scene when a woman has been stabbed (episode 6). The Dade County Fire Department routinely uses helicopters to expedite evacuations for people who have been injured, and the cameras track this process, but one of the firefighters involved isn't optimistic—it's a serious wound. In Los Angeles, an apartment resident has gone out briefly but left a candle burning (episode 9). The entire room blazes, but firefighters are able to contain the damage to the one apartment, because they were called promptly. (According to one member of the company, candles account for a substantial portion of the residential fires in L.A.) In San Francisco, which routinely suffers from a lack of rain for much of the year, a grass fire burns out of control near both a school and a residential district (episode 15). The fire takes several hours to control and is ultimately determined to be arson.

Some of the challenges are surprising. A fire company in Dallas responds to a report of man who has suffered a seizure and collapsed at a shopping mall (episode 13). They arrive just as he regains consciousness, but he's badly disoriented. He doesn't recognize the men as firefighters or understand that they're trying to help him. Instead, he protests their assistance and quickly escalates to screaming and struggling. This continues all the way to the hospital. In San Francisco, firemen are called to help police remove PETA protesters from the roof of a Burger King, because the protesters refuse to cooperate in exiting the premises (episode 5). Each of the protesters has to be dragged down a ladder, endangering herself and the two firemen required for the job.

Certain kinds of emergencies are peculiar to their locales. New York City's ancient water system suffers constant breakdowns, and when a water main bursts, the fire department is usually involved in the clean-up. In episode 16, though, a main bursts in an especially bad place: right below a huge construction crane, which could topple over into a neighboring building if the ground beneath it is weakened by the sudden flood of water. It falls to the fire department to assess the risk and decide on the appropriate precautions. The San Francisco fire department has unique issues with almost every fire, because of the distinctive construction of the houses built on its steep hills; their abutment makes the spread of fire to neighboring buildings even more likely than in other cities (episode 2). And Los Angeles sees a lot of dumpster fires (episode 21), because criminals use them to dispose of evidence.

An especially harrowing rescue occurs in episode 11, where San Francisco firefighters are called to free a fourteen-year-old girl pinned under a train. Miraculously, she's still alive, but there's limited time to devise a method of lifting the train without causing further injury and with enough clearance to remove her safely. The solution isn't obvious, and it takes several attempts.

The shadow of 9/11 hangs over the entire series, even when it's not explicitly referenced. Because many of the New York City firefighters featured in The Bravest died at the World Trade Center, the show became an unintentional memorial to their efforts. The first half of the third episode is devoted to a compilation of interview clips with these men, and it is the only segment where the names are followed by the information that the person speaking on screen is either dead or missing. The firemen interviewed are only a fraction of the FDNY members lost on 9/11, but as one lively and distinctive individual after another talks about his work and his years in the department, the episode does a better job than any memorial I have previously seen at driving home the magnitude of the loss sustained by the FDNY and the City on one devastating day.

In episode 19, members of the Jersey City fire department travel to Long Island for the funeral of a fireman killed in what was, at the time, one of the biggest tragedies in the history of the FDNY, when nine firemen died fighting a deadly warehouse fire in Astoria, Queens, in June 2001. It's obvious that the original intent behind the segment was to show the bond among firemen that transcends geography and local interests. ("No one says goodbye like the fire department", as one mourner says.) Of course, by the time the episode aired, it had acquired huge additional resonance, without any need to change a frame or a word.

The Bravest Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Why is this show on Blu-ray? None of The Bravest was shot on hi-def video. All of it was recorded on standard definition video, including the so-called "Vest Cam", a mini-camera attached to the harness holding a firefighter's oxygen tank and designed by the same technical gurus who created the hidden cameras for HBO's Taxicab Confessions series. The Vest Cam footage (which is clearly labeled as such) allowed the production to obtain footage from inside fire scenes where a camera crew would not have been allowed, but the quality is that of low-grade streaming video. Even COPS didn't go HD until 2007.

Nevertheless, this standard definition has been upscaled to 1080i and encoded with AVC for Blu-ray by Image Entertainment in its original 1.33:1 broadcast ratio. The results are perfectly adequate, but nothing to celebrate. In the best shots, all the detail that one would expect from a 480i source is there (but no more), and the upscaling hasn't introduced additional artifacts beyond the combing and aliasing that were undoubtedly there already. Many of the shots are dim, low-contrast and noisy due to low-light conditions and/or fast motion, and the upscaling merely serves to emphasize the weaknesses in the source material. Colors are decent but modest. Given the price point, there's no harm in getting this on Blu-ray instead of standard DVD, but there isn't an obvious advantage either, at least as far as image quality is concerned.

The Bravest Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The show's original mono soundtrack is presented as Dolby Digital 2.0 at the standard DVD bitrate of 192 kbps. There's not much here beyond Greg Stebner's solemn narration and the voices of the individual firefighters and occasional bystanders and victims. The latter were captured on the scene or in the stationhouse, and DD 2.0 is more than adequate to render these low-quality recordings. The former was studio produced, and while it might sound slightly better in lossless, I doubt anyone would care. The instrumental musical track is primarily mood music, and it is almost always kept in the background. It doesn't have enough presence for anyone to notice the lack of lossless treatment.

The Bravest Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The Blu-rays contain no extras.

The Bravest Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Despite the lack of hi-def detail, I'm glad I watched The Bravest. It's the first time I feel I've learned anything accurate or specific about what firefighters do and how they do it. Films like Backdraft show how they casually wreck places when they go in to put out a fire, but The Bravest explains the reasons why they do so. It turns out there really is a purpose behind all that wanton destruction, even if enjoying it is something of a fringe benefit. ("What other job lets you break things?" asks one firefighter, and he's only half-joking.) While I can't recommend the series as a Blu-ray, I do recommend it as a viewing experience—and the DVD set is almost twice the price.